Handset Wringing

Reports of the handset market's demise have been greatly exaggerated. While handset manufacturers such as Nokia and Ericsson have been reporting slower-than-expected growth and a bottoming-out of handset revenues, people are fretting that the boom for handset sales is long nce behind us.

However, while it certainly is getting harder to find virgin buyers for many basic handset models, the industry must remember the elaborate shape-shifting that traditional handsets and other devices are going through right now.

There has been a lot of talk about converged PDA/smart phones and other multi-talented devices lately, along with the ongoing guesswork about the need for mobile devices to be Bluetooth-ready or even, more recently, Wi-Fi compatible.

The rapid and innovative evolution and potential convergence of mobile devices makes the device market a very exciting place to be, but also an increasingly confusing and intimidating environment for consumers. I fancy myself as someone who is fairly quick to adopt that latest in mobile handset capability, but the rapidly evolving nature of both PDAs and Web-ready phones — and the potential for some kind of collision — induces in me a form of buyer's paralysis. It seems to me that other consumers may feel the same way.

Short of a simple-minded plea for technology to slow down (Stop the world! I want to get off!), a possible solution to the handset market growth crisis lies in the ability of handset and PDA manufacturers, along with carriers, to better explain directly to their customers where these devices are going. The groups of users that carriers and vendors would target to repeatedly purchase new handsets are an intelligent lot, and sharing a product roadmap with them once in a while might stoke what some people suddenly see as a sale market. I know it would snap me out of my coma.